Mia’s Story

Mia is 12 years old and has Polyarticular Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) diagnosed 5 years ago when she was 7 years old. Mia has over 25 of her joints affected including her jaw, fingers, wrists, elbows, knees & ankles! JIA is a very debilitating disease causing pain, stiffness & swelling in her joints which has a major impact on her daily life.

JIA is an autoimmune disease so it is different to the type of arthritis that older people get.

Along with daily pain medication, Mia has to have an injection at home once a week and every 4 weeks she has to go to Great Ormond Street for an infusion of a biologic drug to help with the JIA symptoms! Both of these drugs lower her immune system which causes a whole lot of other problems!

Last year our local community nurses nominated Mia for a Dreamflight holiday & she was extremely lucky to be given a place! In October Mia went off to Florida for 10 days with 190 other children & they really did have the time of their lives! They were looked after by an army of Doctors, Nurses, Physiotherapists & non medical helpers, who were all absolutely brilliant! They got to do all the theme parks and even got to swim with the dolphins, which was amazing!!

Mia is doing the 10K parallel London walk to raise money for Dreamflight so that she can give another child with a serious illness or disability the same life changing experience that she had in Florida!
The walk is going to be very challenging as Mia has not been able to walk for about 6 weeks! But she’s very determined! I will be behind her every step of the way!

Dreamflight gave Mia something that I could never have done, and the care and support they gave her for the 10 days was just amazing and most of all they gave her amazing memories that will stay with her forever!! I can never thank them enough!!